Mozilla's announced that its “Firefox Focus” ad-busting browser has made it to Android.
Focus has been available on iOS since late 2016. The browser's lead feature is hiding traces of web searches so that ads can't follow you around the web. Mozilla feels doing so enhances privacy and speeds up surfing as you won't be …

Re: Up to 40%?

But it also results in a 100% reduction in Google's earnings per page view, and they won't stand for that. If a proper ad blocking solution became popular on Android, they'd be forced to act to stop it.

Re: Call me

Hmm

"...now uses its Brotli compression algorithm to serve display ads. The ad giant says ad downloads shrink by between 15 and 40 per cent as a result and therefore delivers “faster page loads and less battery consumption.”

Less battery consumption for the download process maybe. The compressed data has to be decompressed though and that has a processing/energy cost. I'd be surprised if overall battery consumption actually went down with compression.

Re: Hmm

"I'd be surprised if overall battery consumption actually went down with compression."

It's possible. The radio is quite power-hungry, which is why there are options to switch it off. Trading radio time for CPU time is a possible win (but I like Firefox's algorithm more).

A hint for Google, since all their ads are targetted, they could probably get away with delivering the same ad multiple times, from the phone's local cache. That would be even more efficient. Looking even further ahead, build some kind of ad server into the phone, which downloads targetted ads in advance when plugged into the mains and using wifi, and delivers them effortlessly during the day when you are on battery and a mobile connection.

Re: Hmm

I'd be surprised if overall battery consumption actually went down with compression.

Be surprised then. For starters, guess what? It's already using compression, just gzip compression - 15-40% is how much better brotli is compared to gzip at compressing.

Less radio usage results in less battery consumption, and these are very simple decompression algorithms. Radio on for 5 seconds vs radio on for 1 second and 0.1 second to decompress, which do you think is better for the battery?

Brotli in particular is designed to be at least as fast as gzip in decompression, as good at compressing as bzip2, but at the expense of not overly caring how slow compression is.

Re: Hmm

Re: Hmm

@Ken Hagan

I really didn't want to upvote your post. The last thing we need is more advertisements. On the other hand, better methods of delivering them might make them suck less. On the gripping hand, a more efficient delivery system, with the concomitant reduction in suckage, would just encourage them to put in more ads until the suckage broke even (or had an overall increase).

Re: Hmm

"Looking even further ahead, build some kind of ad server into the phone, which downloads targetted ads in advance when plugged into the mains and using wifi, and delivers them effortlessly during the day when you are on battery and a mobile connection."

Re: Paradox. Everyone hates ads. Everyone wants stuff for "free".

Re: Paradox. Everyone hates ads. Everyone wants stuff for "free".

Let them suffer, at least for a while. It'll teach them a little humility that users are not cash cows. It'll also bring a reality and oversight to marketing team, who in my experience don't give a shit about impact, just short term visitor figures (I used to work for a marketing company and their attitude is enough to make any IT manager cry, when you have to deal with the fall out and blacklists etc)

Re: Paradox. Everyone hates ads. Everyone wants stuff for "free".

Re: Paradox. Everyone hates ads. Everyone wants stuff for "free".

At a very rough guess El Reg might be making £20 a year from me. Now I could pay that as a subscription but I probably wouldn't. The Guardian makes considerably less but I am considering a subscription there too even though it's more expensive than advertising for the amount I use their site.

Now it strikes me that if there were a central fund - maybe a subscription or akin to a TV licence - that publishers could tap into based on page impressions we could get around reader apathy. Now there'd be much arguing over the equivalent to a CPM (El Reg will demand a higher fee per impression than the Daily Mail) but it could work.

The train companies already do something similar - you buy a London to Birmingham ticket and Virgin get 70%, London Midland 20% and Chiltern 10% or whatever the split is.

It would need tracking to work, but that tracking wouldn't necessarily be used for anything else and avoiding it would almost certainly be considered fraud.

Re: Paradox. Everyone hates ads. Everyone wants stuff for "free".

Actually, on reflection I think I'd rather pay, it's just that I don't often find much worth paying for.

If there was on option on Google that let me pay £5 a month for their services and freed me from all their insidious advertising and data collection, I suspect they'd be getting a hell of a lot more money than they could generate through advertising to me or using my data.

I know the value of their data set is only realised when aggregated over lots and lots of people, but in the end it's all just snake oil to lure the advertisers. It can all be done with good old simple subject matter context, so that adverts relate to the content of the internet, not the personal information of people.

Re: Paradox. Everyone hates ads. Everyone wants stuff for "free".

Unfortunately until the website owners finally understand that putting several screens worth of utterly useless, devaluing trash adverts all over their pages we're going to be stuck with his rubbish for some time. There are countless websites that I can no longer be bothered to visit because the experience is so painful.

And I suspect that in traditional moronic marketing accounting practices, the owners of these websites are seeing less income from adverts and therefore increasing the number of adverts to compensate.

Re: Paradox. Everyone hates ads. Everyone wants stuff for "free".

Sooner or later people will have to find a new funding model for web sites.

Efforts should be rewarded.

I fully agree with you.

The thing is, ads don't *need* to be intrusive and annoying to be effective.

The situation we've arrived at with an arms race between advertisers and browsers has ultimately been caused by a parallel arms race within the advertising industry itself, where every ad has to out-do the others around it in order to make itself seen.

Combined with a vicious circle where website owners are getting paid less and less for showing more and more ads, and it's no wonder that things hit breaking point.

I don't know what the solution is. As you say, revenue from advertising is necessary for supporting many good sites, but until the industry gets a grip on itself it's difficult to criticise anyone for using an ad-blocker.

Re: Paradox. Everyone hates ads. Everyone wants stuff for "free".

Re: Paradox. Everyone hates ads. Everyone wants stuff for "free".

Ads have gone from simple "animated GIFs" to von Neuman complete bundles of Flash and/or Javascript. Before you had to display ads, which was rather harmless, now you need to execute them, with all the security implications that brings.

Re: Paradox. Everyone hates ads. Everyone wants stuff for "free".

If there was on option on Google that let me pay £5 a month for their services and freed me from all their insidious advertising and data collection, I suspect they'd be getting a hell of a lot more money than they could generate through advertising to me or using my data

I think you'll find Google take the £5 and still track you on the basis that a fool and their money are easily separated.

Re: Paradox. Everyone hates ads. Everyone wants stuff for "free".

"Now it strikes me that if there were a central fund - maybe a subscription or akin to a TV licence - that publishers could tap into based on page impressions we could get around reader apathy"

Wouldn't work - the good / small guys would get next to nothing, while the big guys start using any dirty tricks possible to game the system in their favor. I'm happy paying subscriptions (which I do)... I won't ever pay the TV license again though, I use none of the BBC content, yet they get the majority of it.

Re: Paradox. Everyone hates ads. Everyone wants stuff for "free".

Am I given to understand you don't watch Dr. Who?

Burn the witch!

I thought BBC dumped the good Dr, and sold it to Disney or some equally horrendous organisation who've immediately ruined it for all us Real True Fans(TM) and replaced the good Dr with someone IIRC named Crapoldie or something like that?

(FTR, caught a couple of his eps - the one with the dragon in the moon - that was enough, even that Sylvester fella didn't get scripts that bad! - Not that C writes them but he does choose to act them rather than getting the rest of the cast&crew to revolt because lets face it, those scripts are revolting!)

If the ad spewers didn't make their ads as obnoxious as possible, there wouldn't be this problem. Whoever invented the full screen ad for mobile browsers deserves to be shot. Whoever invented the full screen ad for mobile browsers, capable of activating a mobile's vibrate function, deserves to be shot slowly.

Actually, I tried finding a way to disable that event from firing at all - so far, no luck. Any ideas anyone, other than "block all scripts" which leaves me with a glorified screenshot in my browser that reacts to nothing I do for 75% of websites...?

Re: Why don't we ditch HTML+CSS+JS and just deliver websites as PNGs/JPEGs?

Re: Why don't we ditch HTML+CSS+JS and just deliver websites as PNGs/JPEGs?

Great, until you try making a complex web based interface. Or try copying data from a web page. Or have a funky screen resolution. Or want to ctrl+F to find something on the page. Or want previously clicked links to show up in a different colour. Or want to reply to a comment.

Re: Why don't we ditch HTML+CSS+JS and just deliver websites as PNGs/JPEGs?

No one writes a pile of Javascript where they could use CSS because they want to. The problem is support for most of the newer CSS features is very uneven, and if you have to use a Javascript polyfill for older browsers, you might as well just implement the stupid thing in Javascript to start with.

Re: Why don't we ditch HTML+CSS+JS and just deliver websites as PNGs/JPEGs?

+1 in tribute to coffee spraying incident. Okay. The idea on its face is stupid. Now if someone got it to really work.. then it wouldn't be stupid. Scaling issues, region sense requirements for touch sensors... hmmm....

Targeted ads

If the targeting algorithms were in any way accurate, I would receive no ads at all. In fact, on the rare occasion I actually become aware of what an ad is offering it is generally because it has irritated me so much I have made a resolution to never buy that product. I haven't eaten Shredded Wheat since the "there are two men in my life" jingle first aired.